Rails development on Windows Vista is too slow!

Have you ever said that before? I'm sure you have. ANyway check this out:

Speed up slow Rails development in vista

Labels: rails, windows, windows vista

Copy more than one thing to the clipboard

Wouldn't it be cool if you could just copy more than one thing to the clipboard?

So for example if I need to copy two things on a website and paste it into two separate fields on another website, I would be able to copy both of those things and then paste each of those into their own fields on the other site.

Unfortunately, there's no way to do it, barring software that does way more than that and is unwieldy and otherwise not worthwhile.

I found this discussion, which didn't produce any good leads.

If anyone else knows how it might be done, please leave a comment.

Labels: windows, windows vista

Insert writable disc! Error when burning CD on Windows Vista

This problem might apply to other versions of Windows besides Vista but I tried to burn a playlist of songs from Windows Media Player, and it kept spitting the CD out and saying "insert a writable disc" in the playlist panel and showing a similar error as a pop up message.

I thought it might have to do with Windows or my laptop computer (a Dell XPS M1330), but the solution is pretty simple: use a different disc!

It just didn't like the disc I was putting in, maybe it was too cheap, too old, who knows. But once I put in a new disc I got from Staples, a 4.7GB DVD-R disc it didn't complain.

Labels: windows, windows vista

Windows Vista Task Manager is Broken!!

So you think it's broken because it only shows you one panel, right?


I was wondering about this for weeks until I figured out that all you have to do is doubleclick somewhere around the edges of the task manager window, and it comes back. You can then see all the panels. If you want to "minimize" again, just doubleclick the edges again. Pretty stupid from a usability point of view, but it's Microsoft. What do you expect?

Labels: windows vista

Network Icon Disappeared!

My Network Icon and Volume Icon disappeared from the Windows Vista taskbar for some reason. If it happens to you, right click on the taskbar and select Properties (at the bottom). On the Notification Area panel, you'll see the System Icons section, if the icons you want are unchecked, check them.



The problem is when they are grayed out. In this case, the first thing you can try is restarting explorer.exe. Go into Windows Vista task manager, and end the process. Then restart it by clicking Create New Task and typing in explorer.exe

If that doesn't do it, then you need to go into the registry editor under:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TrayNotify key.

And delete from there, IconStreams and PastIconStream.

Now restart explorer.exe again just as before. The icons probably won't show up still. Now all you need to do is right click on taskbar and go to Notification Area panel and enable the missing icons by selecting their checkboxes.

Credit where it's due.

Labels: vista, windows vista